What He Loves Most
by Gotischemaedchen
Summary: In the middle of the night, Sweeney Todd and Eleanor Lovett are both unable to sleep and in need some comfort. Sweeney notices something that turns his world upside-down. Sweenett. Rated T for safety. Reviews are greatly appreciated!


Benjamin Barker loved many things about his wife. He loved the way that her crystal tears formed shapely marble-like droplets on her eyelashes when she wept. He loved her rosy lips and the kisses that they so readily and willingly pressed against his own mouth. Her waxen and ethereally delicate hands and fingers fit so well in his own, warming him all over. This warmth conveyed the sense that Lucy needed him; it pleaded for him to care for her, to dote on her. Indeed, there was never an occasion on which Mr. Barker neglected to dote on his flighty, elegant wife. He loved the feeling that she needed protecting, and he knew that he would go to any lengths to do so.

All of these things and more Benjamin Barker loved about Lucy, but there was one particular component of her being that he found absolutely magnificent beyond compare.

This attribute was, without a shadow of a doubt, her diadem of golden hair. In Benjamin's mind her hair was not only golden. It was saffron, amber, honeyed, and tawny; each strand of hair had its own character and its own unique hue.

Oftentimes in the early morning, even before Eleanor Lovett began her banging of kitchen utensils in the pie shop below their apartments, Benjamin would lie awake next to his wife as she slept and tangle his fingers in her silky tresses, only to smooth them back again.

Now, more than fifteen years later, it was all he could do to strain to remember the curve of her face in the early morning light and the sensation of her sleek locks between his fingers.

Sweeney Todd sat in his throne of a barber's chair with his eyes closed, trying to remember. He did this whenever he could spare a moment, as sometimes happened between customers or in the middle of the night when he couldn't sleep. He did not sleep very often, so memory gazing became almost a nightly pastime. He could not bear the thought of the visions of the past slipping away. He wanted to be constantly reminded of everything: the horror and the bliss. He could not—no, would not forget. Sweeney would not allow it.

The mundane sounds of activity reached Sweeney's ears from the floor below. He decided that Mrs. Lovett was probably unable to sleep as well. The reason for this phenomenon eluded him completely; it had never happened before, and Sweeney had no idea as to what could possibly upset the baker so much to cause her to be awake at three o' clock in the morning.

_CRASH!_

The sound of breaking glass from the shop below brought Sweeney completely out of his dream-like state and out of his chair. His hand found the biting cold of the razor in its holster on his belt, and the shining silver blade was soon growing warm in his right hand as he made his way downstairs. The thought of someone coming in from the street in the middle of the night and uncovering the successful little operation between he and Mrs. Lovett turned Sweeney's stomach urgently. He flicked open the blade as he reached the bottom of the stairs. The parlor was dark and seemingly empty, and Sweeney's eyes traveled across the sofas and the fireplace to the front of the pie shop. He heard the sounds of rustling and a low whispering, and he raised his arm and took a few silent steps forward.

By the moonlight that shone weakly through the shop's front windows, Sweeney discerned a lone figure kneeling on the floor by the counter.

"Who are you?" he rasped, his voice coming out much softer than he intended it to. The kneeling person gasped, and Sweeney lowered his razor in annoyance. Mrs. Lovett.

"Cor, Mr. T, you gave me an awful fright," the telltale voice cried. There was something off about her voice, though; something wasn't right.

"What in heaven's name are you doing sitting in the dark?" Sweeney asked, his voice betraying his exasperation.

"I came down 'ere to get somethin', and I dropped the oil lamp. I'm tryin' to get all the bits of glass up," she replied, and made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a sniffle. Sweeney definitely heard that. She was crying over a dropped lamp? Sweeney resisted the urge to shake his head, and instead knelt down to help her pick up the shards of glass that littered the floor. The pale light of the moon helped them to pick up most of the pieces, but there was still the oil that had spilled over the battered floor.

"Back in a tick," Mrs. Lovett said, disappearing for a few moments into the parlor. She returned carrying two lit tapers on a tray. By the light of the small flickering flames, the barber and the baker tidied up what was left of the mess. As Sweeney knelt down next to her, he furtively studied Eleanor's face in the faint orange glow of the candlelight. Her eyes were most definitely puffy, her cheeks oddly flushed. A strange and unfamiliar feeling suddenly welled in his chest, something that he couldn't remember feeling in a long time. As he continued to scrutinize her face, it hit him. He pitied her. This revelation annoyed him, and he tried his best to shake it off.

Another thought then came to him: why was he helping Mrs. Lovett to clean up a mess that she had caused through her own clumsiness? She was a grown woman and perfectly able to care for herself. He had stopped to help her without thinking about it. It was a very Benjamin Barker thing to do, he admitted to himself with a mounting feeling of disgust. _Benjamin Barker is dead_, Sweeney Todd reminded himself and gave an imperceptible and determined nod.

"Care for some gin, love?" Eleanor asked in a pseudo-cheery manner when they were finished. Sweeney gave her his usual curt nod, and she began rummaging through the cabinets in search of her latest hiding place for the alcohol. Mrs. Lovett had recently become quite adept at concealing the whereabouts of the gin, thanks to a certain boy named Tobias Ragg.

Having found the gin and two small glasses, Eleanor set them on one of the weathered shop tables and sat down at it. Sweeney briefly considered retreating back upstairs to his shop and his memories, but the thought of alcohol was too enticing for him to pass up. He sat across from the baker, and she poured the clear liquid into his glass. He drank down most of the contents of the glass in one gulp, grimacing slightly as the liquid burned his throat.

After a few moments, Sweeney became aware that it was eerily quiet. He glanced across the table to find Mrs. Lovett glumly nursing her glass of gin and fiddling with the ruffled sleeve of her dressing gown. Sweeney could never remember her being so quiet in his presence, even in the old days. She was always prattling about one thing or the other: how disagreeable people's manners were in the marketplace, how busy the pie shop had been during the dinner rush, what new furnishings she had supplied for the parlor. For once, it seemed, Mrs. Lovett had absolutely nothing to say. Or rather, she had plenty to say, but she felt it wise to keep her thoughts to herself.

Sweeney felt as though he should be relishing this unusual peace and quiet, but something about it was much too unnerving. He cleared his throat.

"You're upset."

It was a statement, not a question. Mrs. Lovett raised her eyes to his.

"It's nothin', dear."

Sweeney raised an eyebrow at her. If Eleanor Lovett, one of the most lively people he had ever known, was upset enough about something to stop her constant flow of chatter, whatever was bothering was definitely not nothing. Eleanor saw the incredulous look that he gave her, and she looked down at the table with pursed lips. Sweeney watched as tears brimmed in her dark eyes, and he began to panic inwardly. He had not had to deal with a crying woman in fifteen years, and he hadn't been terribly good at it back then. Mrs. Lovett's tears quickly began to trace shining, watery lines down her cheeks. Sweeney averted his gaze from her face to give her a chance to compose herself.

"I'm sorry, I…I don't know what's come over me," she said shakily, her tears perfectly audible. Sweeney chanced another glance at her and saw her hastily wiping away the watery evidence from her face.

"I'll just be getting back to bed now, Mr. T," Mrs. Lovett said hurriedly as she got up from the table, not bothering to pick up the abandoned glasses or the bottle of gin. _Do something_, Sweeney thought urgently as he watched her begin to walk away from him.

"Wait," he heard his own voice rasp. Mrs. Lovett stopped and turned to him as he got up from the table and made his way toward her. A thick shaft of moonlight enveloped the spot where her steps had alighted, and as Sweeney got closer to her he saw a fresh tear begin to roll down her prominent cheekbone. He stopped in front of her, his mind frantically groping. He felt a strange and overwhelming need to say or do something, but he was at a loss as to what could be done. Eleanor's eyes searched his face with confusion.

"Yes?" she asked, her voice very small and diminutive, very unlike her usual boisterous vocalizations.

"I-I'm sorry," Sweeney muttered, feeling his face heat up with embarrassment at being caught making a fool of himself. He hoped that the room was dark enough to hide his probably reddening face.

"That's all right," Eleanor said softly, looking up at Sweeney's face in a kind of confused wonderment. "I suppose I'll be off now," she added, beginning to take her leave of him. She would have gotten away if Sweeney had not noticed something that he had never noticed before.

Her hair.

It was the first time he had ever seen it down completely, free from the usual pins that kept it piled on her head and out of the way. Dark auburn curls framed her pale face and spilled down past her shoulders in an intricate and yet completely coincidental arrangement. Her hair suited her; it was suitably erratic, yet somehow still alluring.

Sweeney's hand quickly shot out and caught Mrs. Lovett by the wrist, making her whip around to face him again. Her dark eyes, still quite wet, had now grown wide in alarm. She opened her mouth with the intention of asking Sweeney what in the hell he was doing, but her voice died in her throat when the hand that was not closed around her wrist reached out to touch one of her wayward curls. He gently tucked the dark tendril behind her ear, letting his hand linger there for a moment before burying his hand further in her thick locks. Sweeney drew in a sharp breath as the nearly forgotten feeling of a woman's hair gliding effortlessly through his fingers came back to him with full force. His eyes fluttered closed for a moment, and he journeyed back to years long past and the joy that had been his. Once again his beautiful golden-haired enchantress lay next to him in the early morning, and once again his fingers found their way into the strands of varying hues of yellow. Lucy turned her head to look at him, and her cornflower eyes were filled with so much adoration that Sweeney thought his heart might burst. Then suddenly and without warning, the eyes changed to dark brown and the silky light tresses transformed into wild chestnut and russet curls.

Sweeney's eyes shot open, and his hand pulled away from the woman in front of him as though from a hot ember. Mrs. Lovett's eyes were fixed unfalteringly on him, and Sweeney saw something in those large dark eyes that he didn't want to know about or scrutinize. What he saw there within her eyes was a pure feeling that he had not truly felt himself for years. To his horror, it was also dreadfully similar to the emotion that he could perceive blossoming somewhere deep within himself.

He fled. Even when he escaped upstairs to his shop his unease did not dissipate. He picked up a flask of cologne from the counter in front of the mirror and hurled it at the wall, where the glass container shattered into tiny fragments. Looking at the broken pieces of glass on the floor only made the events that had transpired downstairs rush over him again in a wave, and he let out an audible groan. He sank down into his chair, willing his thoughts away from her. He took out his razor from its holster, the sensation of the cold silver against his fevered skin easing the torment within his mind.

No matter how hard he tried, however, the memory of her auburn hair beneath his hand lingered in his mind. Soon the sun rose and feebly reached its rays through the clouds and into large window of Sweeney Todd's tonsorial parlor.

_Yes_, he gradually and grudgingly allowed himself to admit after hours of strenuous agonizing, _her hair is what I love most about her._


End file.
